3-070-882 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Ruins of Carthage, three miles from Tunis, 1881. 'The city of Tunis...is only three miles distant from the ruins of ancient Carthage, shown in our Illustration. Carthage, the Venice of the Old World, the rival of Republican Rome, was a Phoenician colony, from Tyre, founded in the ninth century before Christ. Its commercial prosperity and naval power, till the third Punic war of the Romans completed its destruction, were renowned all over the shores and islands of the Mediterranean, and even among those of Western Europe on the Atlantic Ocean. There is little doubt that Carthaginian maritime enterprise reached the British Channel, as well as the Bay of Biscay, and on the western coasts of Spain and Gaul its trade has been distinctly traced. About the year B.C. 146, the city was demolished by the Romans, who afterwards erected a new colonial town upon its site. This in its turn was destroyed by the Saracens, about the end of the seventh century of the Christian era, and nothing is now to be seen but a few shapeless fragments of masonry, which appear to be the remains of vaults and cisterns. The small domed building, seen in our View of Carthage, is a Mahommedan shrine of later date'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.